Here’s a paper related to the galbulimima alkaloids, which were made famous by Lewis Mander’s group. Regan Thomson and co-workers report in JACS on the synthesis of galbulimima alkaloids. A nice collaboration with DFT calculations from Dean Tantillo’s group shows the orbital interactions in the transition state structures of the Diels-Alder reactions.

Another Houk collaboration – this time with Grubbs’ lab. They studied the mechanism of the carboxylate assisted C-H activation of the metathesis catalyst. The SDD basis set was used to approximate the orbitals of ruthenium in this report.